COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Fire tornados, or 'fire whirls,' pose a powerful and essentially uncontrollable threat to life, property, and the surrounding environment in large urban and wildland fires. But now, a team of researchers in the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering say their discovery of a type of fire tornado they call a 'blue whirl' could lead to beneficial new approaches for reducing carbon emissions and improving oil spill cleanup.

A new paper published online August 4, 2016, in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describes this previously unobserved flame phenomenon, which burns nearly soot-free.

If you're the type of person who lets closet clutter creep into their lives, a connected wardrobe may be for you. It reminds you to wear unworn clothes or to give them away to charity.

Like most things that invoke terms like "ethical" and "consumption", it involves guilt, and a not-so-subtle threat. If you don't wear them, the garments will automatically get in touch with a charity and ask to be recycled, with the Goodwill or whatever automatically sending out a mailing envelope for return. It uses washable radio-frequency identification (RFID) contactless technology which will tweet and message users asking to be worn depending on the weather and frequency of wear. 

A lot of environmental fundraising and lobbying has involved bees. There was talk of a neonicotinoid pesticide-induced die-off, until it was determined that pesticides weren't the problem, varroa mites, and the fad of amateur beekeepers who didn't know what they were doing were the big problems. Traffic accidents killed more bees than chemicals. 

When that failed, activists turned to claims about wild bees. This would seem to have easier success, since wild bees can't really be tabulated. There are over 25,000 species of wild bees worldwide, and only a few have hives to count.

A new review of acupuncture evidence published in Acupuncture in Medicine claims acupuncture may help to improve mild cognitive impairment, the memory loss that may precede the development of dementia - at least if medicine is also used.

A new study, published in Biochemistry this week, examines the biomechanics of sugar-seeking proteins. Specifically, it delves into galectin-3's interaction with glycosaminoglycans (GAG) and proteoglycans. Tarun Dam, an associate professor of chemistry at Michigan Technological University, led the study.

"Seeing galectin-3 interact with GAGs and proteoglycans is like finding a rose in the petunias--it's very unexpected," Dam says. "It's fair to say that this requires revisiting the reported biological functions of GAGs, proteoglycans and galectin-3."

It's summertime, and the fields of Yolo County are filled with ranks of sunflowers, dutifully watching the rising sun. At the nearby University of California, Davis, plant biologists have now discovered how sunflowers use their internal circadian clock, acting on growth hormones, to follow the sun during the day as they grow.

"It's the first example of a plant's clock modulating growth in a natural environment, and having real repercussions for the plant," said Stacey Harmer, professor of plant biology at UC Davis and senior author on the paper to be published Aug. 5 in the journal Science.